e. He has learned there to feel safe from hawk
and cat, and knows enough of other birds to be sure that none of them
will "jump" his little claim of fifty feet square whereof you are the
moving centre. His individual audacity gives him the sway of that
small empire, and he doubts not that you will support him in acting up
to the motto of the Iron Crown of the Lombards. His cousin the robin
may, and very probably does, hover on the outskirts, but an exact
distance measures the comparative boldness and familiarity of the two
species. The catbird is, say, ten yards more companionable than his
red-vested relative in the latter's most genial and trustful mood; and
his faith is of a more robust type and less easily and permanently
weakened by rebuffs. The robin rarely hovers round you, but likes to
have the whole premises quietly to himself. His attachment does not
take a personal hue, but is rather to locality. His acquaintanceship
with you is never so intimate as that of the catbird, who soon
recognizes your step, your dress and the peculiar touch and cadence of
your hoe, even as a college oarsman will identify the stroke of a
chum or a rival a quarter of a mile off. If the robin does fix your
individuality in his mind, he deigns to make no sign thereof. At most
he accepts you as part of the mechanism of creation. You make no draft
upon his bump of reverence. He does not set you on his Olympus. This
mark of the spirit which makes him, on the whole, a more respectable
and dignified character than his less gayly-dressed cousin tends in
some sense to commend him the less to you, since we all like the
homage of the "inferior animals," birds or voters. You half dislike
the independence of the robin, who is equally at home in the parterre
or the forest, on the gravel-walk or in the upper air. On the other
you have more hold. He is rarely seen higher than twenty feet above
ground, and is strictly an appendage of the shrubbery and the orchard.
Even in his unhappy voice there is a domestic tone, closely imitated
as it is from Grimalkin. Imitated, we say, for we have never been able
fully to believe that this mew is the bird's original note. We shall
ever incline to the impression that it is an acquired dialect, picked
up in the mere wantonness born of a conscious and exceptional power of
mimicry.

E. C. B.

A NEW AND INDIGNANT ITALIAN POET.

Mrs. Leo Hunter's selection of an "Expiring Frog" as a subject for
poetical compos